I use two DigitalOcean droplets, one running Apache 2, the other for MySQL (mostly). The Apache 2 droplet is a 2GB droplet in the NYC2 datacenter and the MySQL droplet is a 1GB droplet in the same datacenter. They talk to each other over a private network.

I’ve really liked the setup so far, and without any tweaks to Apache or MySQL, both servers have performed quite well. I use a WordPress caching plugin and CloudFlare, but that’s all there is for caching.

CPU usage remained quite low, you can clearly see the HackerNews traffic.

Eventually, one could expect thousands of users on a site at any given time. That greatly depends on the type of site, though.

I’m going to setup a DigitalOcean droplet to serve as a reverse proxy in the event I need to serve massive amounts of traffic. It’s sole job will be to run Nginx.

I simply don’t need it right now, though. Unless this hits the front page of HackerNews and makes it further up the page. ;). Then I’ll be scrambling to get that Nginx box up. So, put me to work later.

Highest bandwidth usage was 2.33Mbps. DigitalOcean can do a LOT more than that.

I didn’t receive any alerts from New Relic, Mist.io, or Uptime Robot, so all was good. I am, however, still going to prep some kind of solution with Nginx sitting in front of Apache, to at least serve static files.